Members of the Southfield Cruisers bike club ride down Evergreen Road June 17, 2017, during the first-ever Southfield Spirit Fest. Officials are currently planning Southfield’s 60th birthday celebration for April.

City in talks for 60th anniversary event

The Levey Middle School marching band plays some tunes following the parade.

File photo by Sean Work

SOUTHFIELD — Time to bust out the party hats and balloons — the city has a milestone birthday to celebrate.

According to Community Relations Director Michael Manion, city officials are in talks to put together an event to celebrate Southfield’s 60th birthday.

Details are still in the works, Manion said, but the date for the communitywide celebration has tentatively been set for April.

At the Jan. 29 City Council meeting, Councilman Lloyd Crews asked the council if a celebration was being planned.

“I think we should get a committee together to start at least brainstorming at least some things we want to do,” Crews said at the meeting. “I think it would be a good opportunity for us to do so. I don’t want to lose sight of that.”

City Administrator Fred Zorn said an internal committee has been formed to discuss the event, and officials hope to put together an additional committee apart from city staff.

Zorn said that at the end of 2017, the City Council and city administrators outlined an anniversary celebration as one of their goals for 2018.

“Just last week, the 60th Anniversary Administrative Committee did meet for the first time. We proposed a number of recommendations, and we may have those in front of the City Council as soon as the next (Committee of the Whole) meeting in terms of what we’re looking at,” Zorn said. “But we do have about a page of recommendations of events and different things to commemorate the 60th anniversary.”

While the area now called Southfield was first settled by John Daniels in 1823, it didn’t officially become a city until April 28, 1958, according to the city’s website.

By 1830, the area was called Ossewa Township. But 17 days later, residents petitioned to have the name changed to Southfield Township. Officials said it is believed that residents chose that name from the community’s location in the “south fields” of Bloomfield Township. A U.S. post office was established there in 1833, and the first town hall was built in 1873.

In the 1950s, a group of Southfield Township residents pooled their own money to incorporate Southfield as a city. The incorporation vote came in August 1957, and local voters approved a city charter on April 21, 1958. At the time of incorporation, Southfield had approximately 29,000 residents.